The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

181 Pages·2002·1.16 MB·English

by  Steven Pressfield

ALSO BY

S T E V E N
P R E S S F I E L D

Last
of
the
Amazons

Tides of
War

Gates
of
Fire

The
Legend of
Bagger
Vance

The
Virtues of
War

Break Through the Blocks
and Win Your
Inner Creative Battles

STEVEN PRESSFIELD

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book
may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the
publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any
payment for this "stripped book."

Warner Books Edition
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen Pressfield
All rights reserved.

This Warner Books Edition is published by arrangement with Rugged Land,
276 Canal Street, Fifth Floor, New York, NY 10013

Warner Books

Time Warner Book Group

1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com.

Printed in the United States of America

First Warner Book Edition: April 2003

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The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

Pressfield, Stephen

The war of art : winning the inner creative battle / Stephen Pressfield;

foreword by Robert McKee.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-59071-003-7

1. Creative ability. 2. Creative thinking. 3. Authorship. I. Title.

BF408.P74 2002 153.3*5

QB102-701260

ISBN: 0-446-69143-7 (pbk.)
2002102091

Cover design by Brigid Pearson

Cover illustration by Milton Glaser

theWARofART

F O R E W O R D

by Robert McKee

S

teven Pressfield wrote The
War of Art for me. He

undoubtedly wrote it for you too, but I know he did it

expressly for me because I hold Olympic records for

procrastination. I can procrastinate thinking about my

procrastination problem. I can procrastinate dealing with

my problem of procrastinating thinking about my procrasti-

nation problem. So Pressfield, that devil, asked me to write

this foreword against a deadline, knowing that no matter how

much I stalled, eventually I'd have to knuckle down and do

the work. At the last possible hour I did, and as I leafed

through Book One, "Defining the Enemy," I saw myself

staring back guilty-eyed from every page. But then Book

Two gave me a battle plan; Book Three, a vision of victory;

and as I closed The War of Art, I felt a surge of positive calm.

I now know I can win this war. And if I can, so can you.

To begin Book One, Pressfield labels the enemy of

creativity Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what

Freud called the Death Wish—that destructive force inside

human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough,

long-term course of action that might do for us or others

something that's actually good. He then presents a rogue's

gallery of the many manifestations of Resistance. You will

recognize each and every one, for this force lives within us

all—self-sabotage, self-deception, self-corruption. We

writers know it as "block," a paralysis whose symptoms can

bring on appalling behavior.

Some years ago I was as blocked as a Calcutta sewer, so

what did I do? I decided to try on all my clothes. To show just

how anal I can get, I put on every shirt, pair of pants, sweater,

jacket, and sock, sorting them into piles: spring, summer, fall,

winter, Salvation Army. Then I tried them on all over again,

this time parsing them into spring casual, spring formal,

summer casual... Two days of this and I thought I was going

mad. Want to know how to cure writer's block? It's not a trip

to your psychiatrist. For as Pressfield wisely points out,

seeking "support" is Resistance at its most seductive. No,

the cure is found in Book Two: "Turning Pro."

Steven Pressfield is the very definition of a pro. I know

this because I can't count the times I called the author of

The Legend of Bagger Vance to invite him for a round of golf,

and although tempted, he declined. Why? Because he was

working, and as any writer who has ever taken a backswing

knows, golf is a beautifully virulent form of procrastination.

In other words, Resistance. Steve packs a discipline forged

of Bethlehem steel.

I read Steve's Gates of Fire and Tides of War back-to-

back while traveling in Europe. Now, I'm not a lachrymose

guy; I hadn't cried over a book since The Red Pony, but these

novels got to me. I found myself sitting in cafes, choking

back tears over the selfless courage of those Greeks who

shaped and saved Western civilization. As I looked beneath

his seamless prose and sensed his depth of research, of

knowledge of human nature and society, of vividly imagined

telling details, I was in awe of the work, the work, all the

work that built the foundation of his riveting creations. And

I'm not alone in this appreciation. When I bought the books

in London, I was told that Steve's novels are now assigned by

Oxford history dons who tell their students that if they wish

to rub shoulders with life in classical Greece, read Pressfield.

How does an artist achieve that power? In the second book

Pressfield lays out the day-by-day, step-by-step campaign of

the professional: preparation, order, patience, endurance,

acting in the face of fear and failure—no excuses, no bullshit.

And best of all, Steve's brilliant insight that first, last, and

always, the professional focuses on mastery of the craft.

Book Three, "The Higher Realm," looks at Inspiration,

that sublime result that blossoms in the furrows of the pro-

fessional who straps on the harness and plows the fields of his

or her art. In Pressfield's words: "When we sit down each

day and do our work, power concentrates around u s . . . we

become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas

come. Insights accrete." On this, the effect of Inspiration,

Steve and I absolutely agree. Indeed, stunning images and

ideas arrive as if from nowhere. In fact, these seemingly

spontaneous flashes are so amazing, it's hard to believe that

our unworthy selves created them. From where, therefore,

does our best stuff come?

It's on this point, however, the cause of Inspiration,

that we see things differently. In Book One Steve traces

Resistance down its evolutionary roots to the genes. I

agree. The cause is genetic. That negative force, that dark

antagonism to creativity, is embedded deep in our humanity.

But in Book Three he shifts gears and looks for the cause of

Inspiration not in human nature, but on a "higher realm."

Then with a poetic fire he lays out his belief in muses and

angels. The ultimate source of creativity, he argues, is

divine. Many, perhaps most readers, will find Book Three

profoundly moving.

I, on the other hand, believe that the source of creativity is

found on the same plane of reality as Resistance. It, too, is

genetic. It's called talent: the innate power to discover the

hidden connection between two things—images, ideas,

words—that no one else has ever seen before, link them, and

create for the world a third, utterly unique work. Like our

IQ, talent is a gift from our ancestors. If we're lucky, we

inherit it. In the fortunate talented few, the dark dimension

of their natures will first resist the labor that creativity

demands, but once they commit to the task, their talented

side stirs to action and rewards them with astonishing

feats. These flashes of creative genius seem to arrive

from out of the blue for the o b v i o u s r e a s o n : T h e y

c o m e from the unconscious mind. In short, if the Muse

exists, she does not whisper to the untalented.

So although Steve and I may differ on the cause, we agree

on the effect: When inspiration touches talent, she gives

birth to truth and beauty. And when Steven Pressfield was

writing The War of Art, she had her hands all over him.

W H A T
I
D O

I
get up, take a shower, have breakfast. I read the paper,

brush my teeth. If I have phone calls to make, I make

them. I've got my coffee now. I put on my lucky work boots

and stitch up the lucky laces that my niece Meredith gave me.

I head back to my office, crank up the computer. My lucky

hooded sweatshirt is draped over the chair, with the lucky

charm I got from a gypsy in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for

only eight bucks in francs, and my lucky LARGO nametag

that came from a dream I once had. I put it on. On my

thesaurus is my lucky cannon that my friend Bob Versandi

gave me from Morro Castle, Cuba. I point it toward my

chair, so it can fire inspiration into me. I say my prayer,

which is the Invocation of the Muse from Homer's Odyssey,

translation by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, which

my dear mate Paul Rink gave me and which sits near my

shelf with the cuff links that belonged to my father and my

lucky acorn from the battlefield at Thermopylae. It's

about ten-thirty now. I sit down and plunge in. When I start

making typos, I know I'm getting tired. That's four hours or

so. I've hit the point of diminishing returns. I wrap for the

day. Copy whatever I've done to disk and stash the disk in

the glove compartment of my truck in case there's a fire and

I have to run for it. I power down. It's three, three-thirty.

The office is closed. How many pages have I produced? I

don't care. Are they any good? I don't even think about it.

All that matters is I've put in my time and hit it with all I've

got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session,

I have overcome Resistance.

W H A T
I
K N O W

T
here's a secret that real writers know that wannabe

writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the

writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.

What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.